Terry Trippany's blog

The New York Times Co. has been taking a beating over their increasing steep decline in the company's share price, extravagant executive compensation and the dual roles of Class B shareholder Arthur Sulzberger Jr. who acts as both the Chairman and Publisher of the company. These factors have prompted influential wall street investment advisor Institutional Shareholder Services to advise Class A shareholders to withhold votes for 4 directors who are up for election this month. A virtual vote of no confidence by one of the most influential investment advisors in the business according to the Gawker Manhattan Media News and Gossip website.

Columbia University released a presser nearly 10 weeks ago about a "Novel Clinical Trial" involving those damn adult stem cells; you know, the kind we're supposed to pretend are useless as compared to their embryonic predecessors.

The novelty of course comes from the fact that medical researchers are yet again showing promise using non-embryonic forms of adult stem cells. But this trial goes beyond that simple fact; it has the added novelty of using a person's own adult stem cells to treat a form of coronary artery disease that is so severe that traditional treatment is not an option.

The results are very preliminary but even if the trial was in the final phase I wouldn't expect to hear about it in the mainstream media anytime soon. That's because this study breaches all the taboo's of liberal activism by the novelty of its sheer existence. Combine that with the fact that the trial is being funded by a (gasp) major "money grubbing" pharmaceutical researcher and you have all the elements necessary to justify below the fold, section c, inside the back page, small left hand corner, 2-3 lines max treatment (with a little luck).

I submit that a better headline would be “MSM Kills Journalism With Activist Reporting“. It is pretty clear to me that the term mainstream media does not imply professional journalism. Sure, they have the money to dress it up and send it out with all the glitz and glamor of the alluring red carpet spectacle that they have become. But underneath all that flash is a lonely band leader churning out the same droning beat, left, left, left, left… It really doesn’t matter who takes the lead at any given time. They all appear to have gone to the same school that has taught them to put the cart before the horse. Today’s motto, “Lead with your gut and piece together events and words to meet your agenda.” I didn’t start this article looking for bias in the mainstream media; it found me. Naturally I could cut the Reuters article up and only discuss elements that I thought pertained to my premise but there is no need. This style of reporting stands as a whole. The mainstream media suffers from a group think mentality that suffers greatly from a monosyllabic tendency to hire and utilize only those who agree with one political point of view. It is a sad state of affairs.

Be on the watch for the spin. The Georgia State Supreme Court will be deciding an issue that has been bouncing around the courts since 2005. At stake is the state's attempt to reduce election fraud by requiring that all voters show a government sanctioned picture ID in order to vote.

Seems simple, right? Wrong.

The typical detractors, the ones who usually cry voter fraud whenever their favorite pet candidates lose at the polls, are the same groups that are upset over the ID requirement! They argue that the ID requirement is a poll tax that disenfranchises poor people by requiring that they pay to vote. The illogic being applied here is that ids cost money and that poor people are being disenfranchised because they can't afford the expense.

Here is an example of how the issue has been twisted by your typical activists in the mainstream media:

Violence and chaos are terms that are pretty well defined in society. A person tends to conceptualize events tied to such words by visualizing bombs exploding, bullets flying and all commonly associated images from the ravages of war and crime.

But violence is not limited to the media driven coverage that most often captures the readily available public examples of violence. There are plenty of examples of violence that occurs relatively unnoticed to the public eye. Violence such as the quietly executed political and religious persecution that happens in the middle of the night and well away from western cameras. Violence such as the forced recognition of Islamic law by dhimmi slaves and non-religious infidels. These examples, which have plenty of evidence to back them up, are sadly considered non-chaotic because they happen either quietly or with the acceptance of many.

Here is how the New York Times is describing him:

The New York Times ran a story this morning that details how liberally minded school administrators are seeking ways to circumvent affirmative action bans that have been put on the books by voters in three states.

This is modern day liberalism at its naked best. They are not content to accept the fact that voters of all races have rejected attempts by these educators to apply a racial preference as a means test for admission to public schools. The following lead appeared in this morning’s liberal death star.

With Michigan’s new ban on affirmative action going into effect, and similar ballot initiatives looming in other states, many public universities are scrambling to find race-blind ways to attract more blacks and Hispanics.

First of all the above statement is a lie. Any effort to attract one race over another is not race-blind. The activists at the New York Times may want to characterize it that way but in reality it is just another cute attempt to create the perception of racial neutrality.

Today marks the first day that the 110th Congress will address the hypocrisy of Embryonic Stem Cell Research while calculatedly ignoring other stem cell research that proves to be more promising, faster, easier and more ethical.

The last two weeks have been pivotal in this debate ever since Nature Biotechnology published a study that was co-authored by researcher Paolo De Coppi and Anthony Atala through Harvard and Wake Forest Universities, 7 years ago. The study details advances in stem cell research that could be achieved faster and safer with amniotic fluid than could be achieved with embryonic stem cells. In addition, it is being reported that the amniotic stem cells don’t have the propensity to turn into runaway cancer like tumors as has been demonstrated in many embryonic stem cell trials to date.

Saddam Hussein was tried for genocide and crimes against humanity in events that happened over 2 decades ago. His guilt in that one trial spoke to a single chapter whose murderous mark personifies a sliver of the total crimes that Hussein committed in over a quarter century of terror. Yet the mainstream media is beside themselves in trying to recreate the image of Saddam Hussein the killer into Saddam Hussein the victim.

Perhaps topping this list of mainstream media revisionists is the New York Times who tell the latest chapter in Saddam’s life as if the United States is the party responsible for creating the negative image of the “Butcher of Baghdad”.

Like the helicopter trip, just about everything in the 24 hours that began with Mr. Hussein’s being taken to his execution from his cell in an American military detention center in the postmidnight chill of Saturday had a surreal and even cinematic quality.

Thus I was not surprised to read that both the New York Times and the BBC furthered the idea that life in Somalia was relatively calm under the Sharia law that was imposed on the Somali people ever since the Islamists ran the warlords out nearly six months ago.

The Islamists came to power earlier this year as a grassroots movement that drove out Mogadishu’s warlords and restored a semblance of order to a city that was once one of the most violent on the planet. - The New York Times

Some residents say lawlessness has returned to Mogadishu - which had been under Islamic rule for six months. - BBC News

Beware of New York Times articles that include labels commonly associated with progressive political movements. For instance the use of the term "grassroots" typically means a community effort to further an idea or an agenda. I don't know about you but I tend to think that the term is almost always referenced in a positive manner to connote the uprising of popular ideas with communal backing.

Richard Lowry wrote an article that takes conservatives to task for attacking the mainstream media over its coverage of the war in Iraq. Ed Morrissey over at Captains Quarters agrees with Lowry for the most part, adding some advice for bloggers not to become so paranoid that they fail to discriminate between biased news and good reporting.

I agree with both articles on many points. Not all coverage of the war is biased and the media certainly shouldn't ignore bad news on the war effort for the sake of presenting a picture that isn't true. But there is a difference between reporting the news and being an advocate for a political party that stands to gain if the "opposition party" fails in the effort to win the war. Objectivity is thrown out the window when this happens and good news is simply ignored.

As if the staged picture isn’t stomach churning enough, the staff blogger breathlessly penned the following in describing the rock star's visit.

Several of the students clutched copies of the 10th anniversary edition, released last week, of Mrs. Clinton’s book “It Takes a Village.” Mrs. Clinton patiently obliged, signing the books – as well as a baseball, a statistics textbook and even scraps of looseleaf paper. She did not make any public comments about her political aspirations.

It helped, Ms. Hamdan thought, that there were so many similarities between Islam and the Army.

President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair held a joint press conference today to discuss the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group Report. The main goal of the presser was to show unity between the two leaders and discuss the plan going forward.

Apparently that goal is not in line with the mainstream media mission that is focused primarily on getting President Bush to admit that the War in Iraq is not going well. The underlying theme is that President Bush is still in denial. The only remaining question is whether or not some lucky reporter can get him to admit it.

One of the CNN reporters actually pondered if Tony Blair can get President Bush to face up to the difficulties in Iraq and admit that we need a new direction. Sure, President Bush has no clue as to what is going on.

The article, Court Reviews Race as Factor in School Plans, is just what you’d expect from hacktivist reporters who spend just as much time furthering an agenda as they do in reporting out of context and sparsely connected facts. The end result is an article that has little to do with being correct let alone honest.

I can see, I CAN SEE!! November 8th, 2006 brings us news of “stunning” breakthroughs involving non-embryonic stem cell research. And to think that it only took the completion of a United States election for the press to cover these stories.

The first study involves the transplantation of retinal cells into the eyes of animals that have damage similar to that found in humans with various eye diseases. The study “challenges conventional biological thinking” because it shows that cells that have stopped dividing are better suited for transplantation than earlier stage embryonic stem cells.

Two versions of the report are circulating around; the MSM version as found in the BBC News Health section and the version being reported in the news arm of the Journal Nature.

Nobody should be surprised when the MSM takes an anti-American angle on just about anything that is printed in the press today. Surprise is mostly reserved for articles that are fair and objective.

Thus I was typically disappointed when I opened the AP section of Yahoo News and was confronted with “World opinion divided on Saddam sentence”. However, as I read the article I was stunned at how willing the writer was to allow questionable claims to go unchecked by those opposed to the War in Iraq and U.S. foreign policy. (Update - The AP Rolled the article off the wires so I replaced the link with an ABC news copy).

There is rarely a time where a statement by Republicans or President Bush is left to hang without the typical “yeah but” rebuttal. Yet the Associated Press has reached a new low in unprofessional reporting as they allow the following quotes to hang as if they were accepted dogma; which may in fact be the case for the reporter on this story. (all emphasis mine)

WASHINGTON (AP) -- So much for the Republican charm offensive toward minorities. Black voters are far less likely to approve of the way President Bush is doing his job than voters generally and they are more likely to feel that the country is on the wrong track, disheartening news for a Republican Party that has been trying to curry favor with minority voters in recent years.